Oliver Pollock (1737, Bready, County Tyrone, Northern Ireland – December 17, 1823, Pinckneyville, Mississippi) was a merchant and financier of the American Revolutionary War, of which he has long been considered a historically undervalued figure.
Two years later, he began his career as a merchant, trading from port-to-port with the Spaniards in the West Indies, and was headquartered in Havana, Cuba.
Pollock began working as a merchant in New Orleans and, through his relationship with O'Reilly, was favorably received by Spanish Louisiana's officials, who granted him free trade within the city.
[4] He used his fortune to finance American operations in the west, and the successful campaign of General George Rogers Clark in Illinois 1778 occurred with his financial support.
In the same year, he borrowed $70,000 from Spanish Louisiana's Governor Bernardo de Gálvez, but the financial needs of the country at the time left him with a loss.
Gálvez and the Spanish troops swept through the future states of Louisiana, Alabama, and Florida, defeating the British with the capture of Fort Bute and campaigning through the victorious siege of Pensacola in 1781.
In 1785 he was released on parole and returned to Philadelphia, where he met a sympathetic Robert Morris, another financier of the war who had also incurred debts as a result.
His burial site is located in the family cemetery there, although his portraits and personal effects were lost in a fire during the Civil War.